Table 1.

Term definitions

Competence: Defined for the purpose of this paper as ‘Being functionally adequate, i.e., having sufficient knowledge, judgement, skill or strength for a particular duty’ (3).

Assessment: Defined for the purpose of this paper as ‘Any method that is used to better understand the current knowledge and skills that a student possesses’ (1).

Procedural skills: Defined for the purpose of this study as ‘skills requiring manual dexterity and health related knowledge which are aimed at the care of a single patient’ (18).

Summative assessment: Assessments generally formative or summative. This paper is focused on summative assessment. In summative assessment findings and recommendations are designed to accumulate all relevant assessments for a go/no-go decision to be recommended for certification (4).

Validity: The concept of test validity is to what extent an assessment actually measures what it is intended to measure and permits appropriate generalisations about student's skills and abilities (5).

Reliability: Refers to consistency of a test over time over different cases (inter-case) and different examiners (inter-rater). We term measurements of reliability coefficients above 0.65 as moderate and above 0.85 as strong (5).